


Kurago (Shortform)

by RoryKurago



Series: Kurago [3]
Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Hong Kong Shatterdome, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Jaeger Pilots, Multi, Pre-Knifehead, Shatterdome Family, Tattoos & scars as record-keeping
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-20
Updated: 2015-02-25
Packaged: 2018-03-08 09:17:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 15,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3203966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoryKurago/pseuds/RoryKurago
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They’re freshly nineteen, they’re Jaeger Rangers and their mother is dead. But they survived Hell Week and Belobog. (Marshal Pentecost’s meditation sessions. Instructor Kodai’s diatribes on the Seven Virtues.) There’s a Class-A photo: them, the Beckets, Javi and Guill, and the Seos. 2016, winter semester, welcome to the fucking war. The UN say, 'congratulations' and the twins think, 'For what?'<br/>They're bound for the soon-to-be-complete Sydney 'dome to back up recently-refitted Tasmania Venator, but everyone is calling Venator 'Nomad' now (new decal, old colours) and nobody's ready to talk about Jayapura.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 2017: Hong Kong

**Author's Note:**

> Short version of the (also-in-progress) KURAGO. Pick and choose which you read, the timeline is the same.

## 2017: Hong Kong

 

They’re freshly nineteen, they’re Jaeger Rangers and their mother is dead. But they survived Hell Week and Belobog. (Marshal Pentecost’s meditation sessions. Instructor Kodai’s diatribes on the Seven Virtues. Godoy’s mechanics pop quizzes.) They’re brushed up all neat-like for Pentecost to pin their wings to their chest and there’s a Class-A photo: them, the Beckets, Javi and Guill, and the Seos. 2016, winter semester, welcome to the fucking war.

The UN say, _congratulations_

and the twins think, _For what?_

 

_(You’re eighteen. Your mother is dead. You’re instructed not to answer the telephone.)_

 

She’s a second-gen Mark-II. Red. Full-bore steel only on 40% of her body (— _a 26% ALS increase, Commanders_ —). More accurate servos, triple-barrel joints. The twins meet her in Hong Kong ahead of her transfer to the still-incomplete Sydney ‘dome and even the persistent cold of the Staging Area can’t dampen the humming in their chests like reactors coming online. She’s only two-hundred-twenty foot and two point two (eight three) megatonne. That’s light on for a Jaeger. They’re not worried, even if the media are. (Will be. When they find out.)

 

Their father doesn’t meet them on the helipad; his co-pilot does. It’s been months since they clapped eyes on Sorvino, and although he’s smiling he looks more worn-through than he did on Kodiak.

 _Your girl’s already in the hangar_ , he says. They want to be grateful but the decal on his sleeve is still yellow and black but it isn’t Venator’s. The Corps has already patched her over. The change should help—but it’s Venator’s colours for the rechristened Kelly Nomad and that’s too much like a kick to the guts. They can give her a new skin but underneath she’ll always be Tasmania Venator, and her ghosts are Collier. The twins’ faces are stony when they ask to see their quarters first.

 

The bunks aren’t made up and the windows look out to sea as if they need reminding, but it’s theirs. The grand total of Rangers in Hong Kong winds up to eleven (active: eight). They’ve already missed the golden days of Rangers jostling shoulder to jaw in the mess, bumping into each other in stairwells. The pilots’ corridor feels emptier after the Kodiak dorms—emptier still because the Hansens (still here; closed doors means no one sees that fistbump) don’t have rooms this level. They’re down in family quarters—two bunkrooms, toilet, and a tiny shared space. (Like Kodiak.) Idly, the girls wonder if they have the same bare metal chairs and table that sticks to the forearm after three hours seated at it unmoving. (Like Kodiak.) Are the bedroom doors are as thin? And if, at three AM, they were to sit up and peer at the light beneath one, would they hear father and uncle?

 

_(You’re ten and there’s no sound scarier than your father sobbing in the living room at midnight.)_

 

They’re nineteen and they meet Scott Hansen coming out of the mess picking bits of bamboo out of his teeth and complaining about the food in _this bloody rockpile_. Sorvino gestures to the twins; his god-daughters. Daz’s girls. Scott’s laugh is sharper than it sounds on camera and his eyes are paler blue, but there’s a warmth to his calluses when he shakes Dana’s hand and says, _more Colliers? Any more of you lot and someone’ll have to talk to the Marshal about having you spayed._

Chuckles is the only Hansen who’s really around in more than a figurative sense (and he’s more a vague impression of scowl and scuffed boots and a streak of green across the hangar towards Lucky Seven than a person). At best he’s dimples and a quick head at maths. At worst he’s a storm in a bottle—screamed profanities and a lugwrench clutched like a lifeline.

So no: they don’t call him Chuckles.

 

They spend too much time in the hangar. Too much time looking at Lucky Seven—partly because they can’t make themselves walk the extra hundred metres to look at Nomad, partly to try and work out how Lucky with her blockier torso and Mighty Glacier fighting style managed to duck a swing that Venator didn’t.

The upshot is the techs all know their faces. (The twins know the techs better than their Bridge Op, and they hear _Norouzi_ ’s voice every day.)

They just don’t know if it’s actually them the techs see.

 

( _You’re ten and someone tells you only tomboys have short hair. You throw a handful of the soft bark around the playground at him. When your father comes to collect you from the school office, he’s still wearing pale-blue-dark-blue-cap-under-his-arm and the look of disappointment is not a paternal one. Your twin is picking bark-flakes out of the grazed knee she got wading in for you. Historically, who starts most of your fights?)_

 

_I will never unsee that._

_You laid the stakes._ Scott’s grin is looser than normal; less calibrated (no cameras). Herc declined to join them so there's just four of them in a booth at the back of an ‘English’ pub in guts of the midlevels, where rice wine battles Tiger beer for space in the bar fridge and an aircon unit wheezes in the front window. But no one cares that they’re PPDC. (Almost no one: three women by the bar have been sizing up the men. A quick whisper and renewed looks of appraisal say they’re hunting Rangers.) The Weis didn’t want anything to do with them, nor did Shen or Po; given Scott's average MO of casual racism and if-you're-not-a-hot-woman-fuck-off, the twins can’t blame them. How quickly is the Hero gloss wearing off? (Did Sorvino come along to get a beer, or supervise?) LT-Father didn't come along either. 

_I said,_ Tahnee corrects, _I’d wager you doing the Funky Chicken against Dana getting all four quarters into the glass. I didn’t say I wanted to see it._

Scott shrugs around his beer, dimplelike scar pulling in one cheek. (Windsurfing accident, he says; barfight, Herc says.) _Consider yaself blessed with the memory._ He makes eye contact with one of the women, whose hip props out. Her chin drops an inch. She knows who he is and what she wants. Scott excuses himself; he can _hear the song of my people._ Tahnee mutters an inquiry to Dana if it’s _Mambo Number Five_ , and Dana snorts into her cider.

 _Is he always like that?_ she asks Sorvino.

Sorvino glances back over his shoulder and a frown shades his eyes just for a moment. _Only on days that end in ‘Y’._ _  
_

LT-Father is not an FLTLT anymore. Was only ever called that because it rubbed him a dozen wrong ways. But he tries ordering them to their quarters when they come back late - even with Sorvino moving ahead to intercept ( _they're fine, Daz, I was with 'em the whole time_ ) - and it just pops out. They should stop it, now—it's weightier now, means an psychological bodycheck with the inertia of Jayapura behind it. But it's deeply-ingrained habit and they are thoughtless sometimes. They're nineteen and they've come a long way to get here from an isolated farm house in WA but part of them is still picking bark out of their knees and running barefoot down a dirt road after a retreating 4WD.

This time his disappointment is wholly paternal but it comes coupled with surprise and alarm.

 

It takes them a little while to actually name her. (Little Red, the techs call her in the interim. They laugh when the Colliers frown.) The twins agreed not to try until they actually saw her, and now they have it’s like trying to name their firstborn and describe a nightmare in one. She’s hooked up to her berth prepping for her field test before they announce it:

 _Dingo_. Small and crafty. The opportunist.

The ‘Kurago’ part is Esperanto—moxie and determination and grit rolled into one. ( _Supposed to be a soft ‘G’_ , Sorvino reminds them, _but you’re right: that does sound a bit wanky_.) The twins call her _Kura-GO_ , and it’s the techs turn to frown because Espinosa and Humon say _Kura-JÓ_. They hold a small ceremony to celebrate anyway: champers and obnoxiously loud music, _here’s to another walking tank_ and _what’s the next verse of that filthy song you were singing the other night?_

Tonight LT-Father looks the other way. (They haven't spoken about the incident outside Motorpool; probably never will.) Tonight, they're just Rangers, celebrating a new start with Brut straight from the bottle.

 

They’re a little tipsy walking back to quarters and they _know_ it but it’s hard to miss the chesty bellow from the other end of the surplus corridor (even at that octave). One voice is lower—the boom of distant thunder in the Margaret River hills. The other is higher: lightning splitting trees. It can’t muddle the words: _Academy_ , _duty_ , _want_ , _they_ , thrown like handgrenades.

Lucky comes up. Then Venator, but Herc’s not having any of it and _do you know how many died in Kowloon are you ready for that kind of weight?_

_I sleep bad enough already. How much worse can it get?_

The twins walk back to their quarters quickly (for a given value of that). But they’re both thinking it: they don’t know the answer to that question. It changes every night.

 

Their father approves, when they announce her name at morning muster. Sorvino approves. Marshal Bae approves. Or at least, she doesn’t see the irony. The handful of other Ranger pairs nod, or smile, or shrug. (The triplets seem bemused, but it’s hardly the weirdest thing Australians in HK have done so they keep fiddling with their legal pads and in the twenty minutes since step-brief started it looks like they’ve hammered out a dozen lines of code. The guys at the Academy weren’t kidding: the Weis are sharp.)

 

General Krieger flies out from Geneva to oversee the first test. His presence should be enough to pour a bucket of icewater into their suits with them except—

Except they’re hip-deep in the Drift and she-Tahnee-Dana-Kurago is all red alloys and brown dam water splashing like diamonds in the sun burning them to a sliver of starlight through the clouds is enough for them to find the three-star chain of Orion ( _the Hunter)_ and his belt—

Norouzi’s dry, accented English informs them their neurotransmitters are spiking and to calm their tits. They’re pretty sure the University of Tehran didn’t teach her that one.

( _No, we shan’t_ , Tahnee mumbles. It’s not like they’re hearing Marshal Pentecost _sotto voce_ counting to seven at the back of their head.)

They walk. They know she can do more than that and they’re chafing at the bit, but this is his and Marshal Bae’s party and they’ve made it clear the twins can be uninvited. No nepotism on this base—no matter that there’s a photo in the Memorial Hall with the same name as their tags. ‘A number of Rangers experienced battlefield fatality in unbreached Jaeger cranial Conn-Pods due to the impact of falling as their damaged Jaegers lost balance’ and Christ wasn’t it a kick in the guts seeing _that_ in their inbox with Ortega’s apologetic _thought you ought to know, this report is happening_. (It doesn’t help to know Tai Lo and Angie Chu’s names are in there too.)

Tahnee takes a sharp breath. Her gauntlet is pinching, but that’s not the root. They’re not going to rabbit. Not here.

Smaller and lighter, said the engineers as they spun up her digital model on Kodiak. Faster servos, new iteration gyros. Less armour—but more mobility. No escape pods. ( _Just don’t get hit yeah_ , hardi-fucking-ha, Hansen, you’re two drinks in and you’re already an arsehole.)

She’s gen-two Mark-II Tacit Ronin scaled down and given a bit of red dust rust, Earth’s defences in miniature. ( _Miniature like a twenty-two to a thirty-thirty_ , whispers Tahnee’s voice in the Drift, and Dana grins. At close range even a peashooter will tear through prey.)

Bae gives them the go-ahead to let her off the chain.

 

( _You are Dingo Kurago, and you can_ run.)

 

Tahnee’s hand is bruised purple when the techs peel it off. The new gloves were a rush job to make it seem like Australia wasn’t slacking (refurbishing a downed Mark-I instead of building another Mark-II). The sweat standing on their foreheads is only partially the effort of shifting the motion rigs. (Lighter than a Mark-I but still equivalent to shifting a fullbody weight-harness through chest-high water. The image drifts through their minds: all the Academy washouts who laughed at those drills. A dozen different _areyoufuckingkiddingmes_ blended up with chlorine; sweatsalt; a USN General saying _if you really want to change the world start singing when you’re up to your neck in mud_ ; Tahnee murmuring _Raaanger, say it with me Na-na_ ; and vibrations in their throats of the Paratroopers’ _Blood On The Risers_ to get their squad through twenty laps.) Tahnee grimaces as a tech unhooks the thumb-loop of her circuitry suit. The techs exchange shifty looks when Dana’s arm tenses in tandem.

 _Blood On The Risers_ will not get them through this; they hum the melody of another old tune instead, something about the rain.

At least they think they do. But the techs are watching them like maybe they’re possessed and when they think about it, there’s no vibration in their throats.

 

It’s called the Crossfire Initiative: one lighter harrier and one large heavy engager. It means they’re Nomad’s back-up dancer. Krieger frowns at Tahnee but he doesn’t correct her.

So naturally Kurago has to be part Jaeger, part cheetah and part psychic.

Dana thinks this is a little unfair. Tahnee thinks it’s a little bit batshit to be making Jaegers _smaller_ while the kaiju are getting _bigger_. That said, Kurago’s so goddamn pretty it might actually work. Murphy’s Laws of the Armed Forces: if it’s stupid but it works, it ain’t stupid.

They’ll leave the psychic part to K-Watch just in case. As Pentecost reminded them: this is War. You’re only as good as the guy beside you. All for one, one for all. Everybody fights, nobody quits. All that _Full Metal Jacket_ , _Starship Trooper_ shit. Who are they kidding? They _love_ that _Full Metal Jacket, Starship Trooper_ shit.

_You following all this, ‘Kurago’?_

_Yes, Sir._ One eye on the fold of skin over the back of his collar. One eye on the maps. Patrol paths picked out around in the Coral Sea and Pacific Islands—yellow for Nomad, green for Lucky, red for Kurago. Sydney’s area will be bigger than other Shatterdomes’, Krieger is saying. Guam is already gone. It would look very good, he says, if they could prevent any other islands from being obliterated incidentally.

 

Krieger sends Kurago out with Nomad to see how she paces. Nomad steps out of Scramble Alley ahead of them. ( _Age before beauty_ — _I swear to God, you are not too old for me to tan your hides.)_ They’re laughing until the white haze of the Drift settles and Nomad’s outline comes into focus halfway through the harbour: black and yellow with her undeployed Stingers projecting up from her elbows like bracers.

For a dark second they forget the patch-over. She’s Venator.

Venator lifting off the tarmac, too slow to duck that haymaker, falling two hundred feet all screeching metal and a half-crushed Pod—

She swings around to ‘look’ at Kurago. Prominent on her chest is Nomad’s device, not Venator’s. The PPDC’s plump little bird, wings outstretched like an eagle’s (RAAF) and a star at her throat. Plain shield in the Corps style. No sign of Venator’s Thylacine. The illusion evaporates. They wade through the water into position.

They know LT-Father can’t see them through Kurago’s visor—but they imagine they can see him. If they dig into the Drift, they can see the grin he’s probably wearing. The one from Graduation Day. Too white. Too stretched. Cracking at the edges like sunburnt leather. Love so sharp and strong within him it’s like an alien entity. They imagine it convulses in time with their breaths—theirs, his, Sorvino’s—all of them synced to a single heartbeat.

In the thrum of her reactor, the twins swear they can hear Kurago echoing it back to them. And in the crackle of the comms, Nomad as well.

 

 _(You’re eighteen and when you listen to your mother laughing as she towels sweat off her face, you can’t decide if you agree with your father when he points out_ Fi, thylacine went extinct _—or with her when she comes back:_ **we’re** going extinct, hon; you wanna bet going bigger and badder for a Round Two wouldn’t’ve brought ‘em back from the brink _?_ _because_ _she looks so fierce and battle-ready even after five hours on the mat that you’d follow her into the mouth of the Breach and you honestly believe she could resurrect a_ species _by willpower.)_

 

They front up on deck to help with clean-up with their legs still shaking. There’s a 100% chance the crew will have to do this again, soon, with alkaline solutes and KB neutraliser, and the twins will never get near her when she’s biohazardous. But they need to know what they’re asking their crew to do. And the hangover goes faster with work.

The deck techs are pleased to instruct them on exactly how Hong Kong’s harbour is fundamentally filthier than most other places. Read: their glee at getting their pilots filthy is boundless. The twins can’t decide if it’s lack of respect that means they don’t bother to hide the laughter, or lack of formality. Maybe both.

The techs are emphatic in how to best angle the pressure cleaner to limit splashback. ( _You’re doing it wrong.)_ The best ratio of chems to break up the diesel scum. ( _Spit. Don’t look at me like that, Commander, it all gets washed out with the rest of the crap. Pull down the facemask and spit.)_ All the nooks and crannies. Dana looks slantways at the first tech to start cussing; that doesn’t last. Tahnee bails. Another hour and Dana’s half-ready to agree with the blackhanders cussing out Kurago’s rotators. They’re not even doing this in the heavy rubber BH suits. The deck is awash with bits of polystyrene, green-grey foam and oily rainbows. The chems splash back anyway, and they taste sour even through the cloth facemask.

The Assistant Crew Chief supervising while the Chief runs up a tech report for official perusal catches Dana giving an access hatch a filthy look and laughs. _Don’t bloody complain to me, ma’am, I just keep the damn thing running, it’s you and the engineers who reckon she needs this many joints._

This is Scrub work. There’s nothing mechanical in it—but it’s part of keeping Kurago going. Dana pulls down her mask and spits.

 

 _(How many cuts and scars do you have by the end of third Trimester? How many were there before you started? Your twin counts them one night, trailing her fingers over an old one on your back, and tells you,_ three new. But they’re not as bad as the old ones.)

 

They’re poring over the joint stress readings from the test in Kurago’s office when a tech approaches them with a finished design of her decal.

They move ceremonially to a gantry opposite her to watch it be painted on by deck-techs in suspension harness. She’s clean and dry now—so freshly buffed those pain-in-the-ass triple joints glint. There’s a twinge of pride they helped get her that way and a lightness in their chests that makes them think maybe they should be in safety harnesses despite the guardrail. The decal is black on red. Silhouetted dogface inside the Corps’ five point shield. The lightness stretches their ribs to bursting. Electricity fizzes in their fingers like feedback. Tahnee nudges Dana with the celebratory ginger beer. Her attention is not on that.

The Specialist notices them watching and does a forward roll in his harness, just to show off. Dana vaguely remembers something about Flipside Circus. The crew call him Spider. Tahnee calls him a show pony and drains the beer because Dana didn’t take it.

 

 

Dana pretends not to notice when the Specialist shows up in the Drift later. Tahnee’s ears are pink as it is and she can’t bring herself to strip off the magic sparking around the memory in the Drift like unearthed current. It isn’t like she has any of her own.

The memory tastes like ginger and salt and heat up her spine that has nothing to do with synaptic fluid relay, and when Tahnee pulls her close after the patrol, resting her forehead against Dana’s and says, _you should try it, Na-na; it won’t kill you_.

 

( _You are born twelve minutes apart. It’s not the longest you’ve ever been separated—but it’s the one you fought hardest against_.)

 

Keeping it in the family’, the press call it when they finally make their first promotional appearance. This is the glamour part of being a pilot and while neither of them are here for that, they can’t help but preen a little. Today the magazines rolled out the photoshoots done over the last month, and they’d be lying if they said they didn’t preen. (Some involve drivesuits. Some: less.) Bushie battlers from the West, they’re calling the twins. Daughters of the Southern Cross. Not a bad step up for a pair of WA Airforce brats.

_Are you proud to be serving your country like this?_

_What’s it like serving alongside your father?_

_Do you share quarters?_

_What would you say to all the girls who want to be Rangers, knowing how hard the training is now for yourselves?_

The twins are so busy frowning at the last inquirer they’re blindsided by the next:

_What do you think your mother would say about you being Rangers?_

They turn their heads to stare as one. The lean, bearded man isn’t familiar, but his press badge bears the logo of the rag that tried to bring down Lightcap and Schoenfeld after Captain Casey.

 _Considering what happened last year in Jayapura, I mean,_ he adds so smugly Dana wonders if he and Scott are related.

There’s a bad taste in her mouth like cheap scotch. Her knuckles ache. Tahnee’s knee bumps hers under the table and she’s already taken the mic to explain how their mother’s life was the RAAF (was Venator) and she’d have been proud enough to burst knowing her girls were out there on the front line carrying on the work she died for.

It’s a lie. But it’s a popular one, and nobody needs to know that famous Kwoon fight that ended up on YouTube and cemented Derek and Fiona Collier as co-pilots was started by the girls’ decision for Kodiak instead of East Sale.

 

_(You’re five and your mother sits you down at the kitchen table to explain 'deployment'. She scrubbed her hands clean before coming home but her skin smells like Solver and the undersides of her fingernails are still black.)_

 

They get used to long runs—hours flying down the perimeter, waving to Borneo and Indonesia as Kurago and Nomad are ferried past. They play too many games of I-Spy with their lead Hawk. Spend too much time in the harness parrying Star Wars trivia with Sawtooth and Bo. (They don’t have faces for the names.) Win too many lyrical challenges against LOCCENT. (Norouzi prefers instrumental tunes; she isn’t as gratified as they expect to share this preference with half the K-Sci department, nor does she appreciate the pilots’ offers to ‘fix’ her.) Lose too many when the topic’s celebrities or sports.

The Hawk contingent calls these ‘milk runs’; probie Rangers wearing out their baby teeth. That cuts closer to the quick the day they wade past Jayapura and realise the first day Marshal Bae sent them out solo is the first time they’ve had this sector of Papua on their patrol map.

Tahnee flicks Dana a sharp look from the map on the HUD. Dana can hear it in her: both of them torn between ‘manipulative’ and ‘magnificent’ as adjectives for _that bitch_ but Norouzi’s listening, probably with Bae right behind her, and anything they say will only draw reprimand for missing this detail during step-brief.

They admire and despise her. The Drift colours orange, then purple, and finally settles back to white. They wonder if she learnt this from Pentecost.

Kurago runs silently for the remaining four hours of patrol except to hail fishing boats and greet the milkmen when the cables descend.

 

( _You’re seventeen and the Jaeger Academy Pilot Program has a failure rate of 86% in Phase One. You wonder if you want it enough to stick out the SEAL Instructors, and shave off half your hair.)_

 

Scott is chased out of the Brazilian ambassador’s house in Happy Valley with a nine iron.

Someone records it on their phone. Someone puts it up on three different websites (gossip rag, local news, Hansens fanclub) and it’s viral in an hour.

When Scott slinks in to muster, his face is carbon-copied off the dog that ate the Christmas chicken then puked it up under the tree: he didn’t get to keep it, and he knows he should feel guilty, but he still got to do it. Everyone is confined to base for a fortnight.

 

Herc flies out to Kodiak alone. He stays a week, and doesn’t say what for when he comes back. Maybe new Jaeger tech. Maybe another pair for probation. (Who are your mentors, Dingo Kurago? They barely say a word to their father, although they eat together most days, and Scott’s a trainwreck for anybody’s role model.)

Herc comes back with looser shoulders and an unlocked jaw. He smiles. Brings back a book of metallurgy for Chuck. It’s in Japanese. The women don’t know if that’s meant to be a joke, a challenge, or an insult, but the way Chuck stares at it over the Rec Room table—

Herc smiles when asked about Kodiak, and tells Chuck to eat his noodles. (He doesn’t.)

 

Kurago’s crew christen her bay The Kennel. Kind of puts a new spin on ‘being in the doghouse’ and there’s a series of scuffles until dopier staff learn that it’s _still_ not okay to call Kurago’s female crew ‘bitches’. Tahnee limps. Dana steals icepacks from Medical. Two male techs are dismissed and a third is detained in the tanks overnight.

Marshal Bae frowns at the twins over her desk because one of the dismissed men was mysteriously kneecapped and no one saw it happen. Just off camera. In a main corridor. In the middle of the day.

If she thinks this is payback for Jayapura, she gives them the benefit of the doubt.

 _Must’ve tripped,_ says Dana.

 _Dangerous, walking in boots that don’t fit,_ adds Tahnee.

 

 _You know, you look like your mother when you pretend you’re not smug like that,_ LT-Father tells them as they step down from the Marshal’s office. _It’s not your best look._

They tug their coveralls straighter and tilt their chins. It’s not innocent. Maybe defiant.

 

_(You’re five and both of your parents are in uniform bound for Base Tindal in an Airforce 4WD.)_

 

Scott – Chuck at his heels and a golf driver on his shoulder – grins when they pass him incognito (windbreakers over their coveralls and patrol caps pulled low). _You’ll learn_.

Y _eah,_ they think. _But what?_

 

Marshal Bae banned them from the Staging Area and LOCCENT for a week. They take the time to inspect the air support squadron. It’s an excuse to get a better eyeful of the fleet than they’ve had from two thousand feet, and to thank the milkmen.

Trailing around the end of a Pelican, they find themselves eye-to-eye with an old school pin-up in too-tight fatigues and a muscle shirt lacquered onto the side hatch of a Hawk. It’s gratifying to note she’s built like a Ranger—somewhere between gymnast and rower, with biceps more cut than theirs and a brace of piercings up one ear. Her hair is unnaturally red. They wonder if she’s meant to be Tamsin Sevier.

Beyond her, a man and woman were leaning against the cabin to chat. There are thin blue and black bands on the shoulders of her bag; thicker on his. They straightened up the moment they sighted Ranger pins, all snap-to and _is there something we can do for you, Commanders?_ The voices are familiar. Raising eyebrows at each other, the twins pull their caps off to get a better look at their lead Hawk pilots. The calligraphy under the pin-up says Sawtooth and Bo. Above that—

Dana nudges Tahnee. Whose idea it was to call the lady ‘Suzy Lee’?

 _Mine,_ says Beauregard. His teeth look very white against his dark skin. _It was mine. And if you like, ma’am, I can give you a better look than you get hanging a hundred feet below her._

 

The Breach alarm goes off at zero-six twenty.

There’s a very sedate PA message requesting all Rangers report to LOCCENT and a brief alert on news and TV feeds advising that movement has been detected, but that’s it. No klaxons. No alarms. (How long has it been since oceanographers located the Breach? How much easier did those extra hours’ notice help the Corps breathe?)

Tahnee is with the Suit techs trying to iron out the pinching in her glove; Dana’s on deck with the duty crew. The deck-techs are on notice the same way the suit techs are: putting the hard yards in now so Kurago’ll be smooth riding all the way to her _Pilot_ editorial. Dana, therefore, is hip to shoulder in lubricant and degreaser on a catwalk off Kurago’s left shin ‘observing’ the differences between Kurago’s layout and the prototypical one of Tacit Ronin: relays, servos, torque and variable reluctance sensors. Tahnee’s shout from the hangar floor doesn’t penetrate the ear muffs but it hits her mentally and rocks her sideways like a seismic event.

It’s only zero-six twenty. It hasn’t been a full three months since the last breach.  But:

_Kaiju!_

It takes an honest second to switch gears from _copper-wiring-triple-insulation-to-reduce-synapse-signal-decay-in-transit_ to _kaiju-attacking-get-to-the-frakking-Jaeger_. She hits the stairs the same time she hits the relay button on her radio. Say again for Collier? Misheard. Must have.

Didn’t. Two hours ago oceanographic sensors in Sector 13H picked up movement. Eastbound. Now it’s confirmed: Scarada, tracking directly east at the coast of Mexico. No visual contact, but water displacement is two point one megatonnes. Category-III.

They dump their borrowed radios in the hands of waiting techs and bolt for the doors, boots landing in time. Category-III.


	2. 2017: Sydney

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Outside’s a gloriously blue morning; seagulls are squabbling over bits of fried lentil; the kaiju for the quarter is dead; and the owner won’t let Rangers pay for anything.

##  2017: Sydney

 

Scarada narrowly bypasses the Isla de Guadalupe. A chopper contingent intercepts him. Lures him south. _How long until the first responders arrive?_ The twins shift their weight and twist their heads to follow Marshal Bae’s line of sight to the LO-tech tracking Jaegers.

There is a betting pool going on deck. They aren’t surprised to hear this from Scott when he ambles in. He senses illicit activity like a dog scenting thunderstorms. (Or maybe it’s the desperation. He has a habit of picking on the weak or unguarded.)

Diablo Intercept or Romeo Blue?

Tahnee's disgust at the notion of profiting off deaths across the Pacific is mute but eloquently stated in the twist of her mouth; she makes a point of closing the Hawk flight manual she had open on her tablet when they jogged into LOCCENT just to look somewhere else. Scott ignores her frown; he’s toting a smirk that says if Romeo touches down first he’s buying for the next week. (Once lockdown lifts.) They lean away when he wanders back to them.

Herc stands near the front on the level with Po, slightly ahead of the Weis but behind Marshal Bae. Nomad came off patrol at four; her Ranger team is out for the count. The LO-techs are flash-welded to their screens. Last time the Colliers were in here, the Hughies ( _LO-techs_ , J-Tech Commander Intooi corrected sourly) were knocking back tea, joking around like a high school IT class. Now, there's no complete visual on Scarada yet but telemetry suggests he’s built along the same lines as Reckoner; the Colliers can’t blame the techs for not looking away. The weird mash-up of centipede and narwhale is nauseating. And he nearly took a spotter bird out of the sky just by porpoising on cue. The Colliers stand at the back of LOCCRENT hoping no one can see their hands shake.

Romeo Blue was grounded six days ago for difficulties with lateral rotation in her hips but there are still three screens tracking her progress en-route to engage.

 _Why are they still sending her out if they don’t know she’s 100%?_ Dana murmurs to Tahnee.

It’s Shen that answers. He swivels his office chair to look up at them with unbrushed hair and an empty mug beside him, faint brown stains dried at the lip. _After Tokyo, do you really think the commanders would let anyone deploy alone against this?_

His accent is light, tone lighter, but there’s no yield in his expression when he raises his eyebrows at Dana. A Chinese translation of _Live-Die-Repeat_ dangles between two of his fingers; the twins wouldn’t have picked him for a Sci-Fi light novel fan (but they wouldn’t have guessed the Beckets could swing dance either).

Scott’s eyes are on a Vietnamese Hughie bending over to compare a tablet with a seated co-worker’s, but he’s listening. _After Sevier, can you blame ‘em?_

 

_(You are five and both your parents are deploying. It is only six months.)_

 

Sorvino staggers in followed by LT-Father at eleven thirty-three. At their heels is Chuck. It’s unclear if they brought him along for the ride or he brought himself, but he’s stressed as a horse in a thunderstorm.

Tahnee clocks his respiration. Colour. Posture. This is five hours after he normally surfaces; the image of his hand locked in his hair, head tilted as he stares at the metallurgy book drifts through Dana’s head before Tahnee even indicates his presence with a nudge to Dana's arm. When Dana looks, his face doubles like a kaleidoscope before Dana closes her eyes to chase the ghosting away. ( _No more late-night sim sessions,_ she thinks, leaning against Tahnee.) She glances back at Chuck again. Sweat is bright on his forehead. At top speed, LOCCENT is six minutes and ten seconds from Hansen quarters (skipping the lifts). His hair sticks out at a hundred angles. Smooshed on one side. White crusts one corner of his mouth—dried drool incompletely scrubbed off. The smell of unwashed teenage boy follows him into the aircon-and-aftershave of LOCCENT like something half-remembered.

Tahnee's frown is twinned in Dana's. This is not normal deportment in a Hansen: hungover Scott is sloppier, early-morning Herc is blearier. His timing is impeccable though:

_Four kilometres out, Ma’am._

Chuck is gung-ho about Jaegers, about Rangers (he’ll be the best, _just wait, laugh it up, greasers_ ) but in the wildness of his eyes he betrays something of himself. He’s past them before the techs have registered he’s there.

Only when he passes Scott does his uncle’s chin jerk down. _Oi—!_

Chuck halts his sprint just short of his father, seemingly pulled up by an invisible leash (or wall) but Scott’s shout caught Herc’s attention. He half-turns just as the woman reports,

_Three kilometres. Two minutes to Diablo entering drop zone._

Sorvino hands the girls a mug each in circumspect silence and buries his face in his own.

Herc’s face as he rounds on his son is expressive: the kaiju or the child? _Chuck—_

Scarada bats for another spotter. Hyper-extendable tail. How did no one notice Scarada has a hyper-extendable tail? He’s bloody _harpoon-fishing_ for choppers. Marshal Bae orders a direct line to the other Shatterdomes and LT-Father is leaning in behind his tech with a face of iron. Herc wavers.

This is the moment a corner is turned. No one will realise for a very long time. He turns his attention back to the screens. His voice drops back to a distant rumble, far off as a storm in the Philippines. What is Chuck doing here?

Chuck’s breathing is levelling out at the same time his ears are flushing red. He wanted to see. To hear. Category-III-- He won’t say that. His head tilts towards a monitor blinking with the little data on Scarada available and when the motion is mirrored in half-scale on Herc as father glances back at son, the twins can _see_ Herc switching gears—Ranger Hansen to Dad. It’s in the slackening around his eyes, the drop of his shoulders. They can see him returning from Mexico (from Victoria Harbour). For a moment they think he’ll relent. Chuck is not supposed to be here ( _Authorised personnel, ladies, so make sure you have your ID)_ but if he stands quietly near the back, no one will comment. This ought to be enough.

But Chuck is not quiet. Chuck does not know how to be unobtrusive—he has never learned. He is a hurricane. A synoptic weather system, he changes the air around him. Charges it. Herc makes a vague gesture to Scott and murmurs something they don’t catch, and whatever it is tenses Chuck up like he’s been electrified. He sparks. Herc reacts.

 _Entering drop-zone, Ma’am,_ says a Hughie.

Diablo detaches. Sound fades out. She’s freefalling, deploying. Two point five megatonnes of global engineering and pissed-off humanity dropped directly into Scarada’s face. ( _What do we say to the god of Death?_ It’s resonant at the back of their minds, American voices with a touch of French lilt: _Giant robots, motherfucker, let’s go._ ) TV feeds from Mexico, SBS, PPN hiss and spark into life on more screens on one wall. Herc half-turns to look at them.

When at last he looks back, Chuck’s ears are red but his knuckles are white. Arms ramrod straight at his sides. His shoulders are made of stone and his voice doesn’t shake. He’s staying.

Diablo leans in for the shunt as she engages. She’s black and green and gunmetal-grey and when her shoulder slams into Scarada’s side, blue spurts over her omega-and-sword decal. The cameras are too far away to pick up the hiss and smoke, but her pilots will already be burning. Electrical feedback: acid eating into their chests, compression in their shoulders. This is the one thing the simulators do not teach. Tahnee’s hand in Dana’s tightens like the pinch of her gauntlet during their field test.

Herc seems to sway. He’s dead straight – thirteen years in the service, posture like a plumbline – but he wavers. Tahnee’s hand is white-knuckled in Dana’s; they’re waiting. For Scarada or Hansen, they don’t know.

Diablo goes flying. Scarada caught her in the midsection with that horn and the toss of his monstrous neck threw her halfway across the bay. A crazy thought flits through their minds how appropriate it would have been if Mexico’s half-built lady Matador Fury had been out there—how bizarrely funny. How ironic for the _terrero_ to be gored. ( _Olé,_ Javi jokes, walking out of their first sim session.) They don’t smile.

It’s Category III, and August 2013. It’s March 2016 and the feeling of beating their fists against sandbags until their knuckles bled. It’s Sorvino finding them sitting at a tiny kitchen table with their forearms stuck to the metal, red seeping through poorly-applied gauze, and the death in LT-Father’s eyes when he stepped off the plane from Davao straight into the twins' declaration _we’re still going to the Academy_. It’s the anger in the line of Herc’s arm as he points out of LOCCENT, and the angle of Chuck’s jaw as he tips his head back and says, _no._ It’s all of these things and the thump of their hearts as they stood on a gantry looking at Kurago—and they realise that at some point, _this_ has become the war they are fighting:

To keep all their shit together while the world falls apart.

Diablo is not winning. Romeo is still ten minutes out. The Weis are peering back at the source of the shouting. The Colliers are fixating on the screens to block it out; at the back of their minds, San Francisco burns. The hollowed-out shells of the XZ rebuild and unbuild themselves again like a timelapse on a loop. And beneath all that a yellow-and-black Jaeger lolls supine in the waves off Jayapura, her Conn half caved-in.

Chuck moves closer to his own father like physical proximity will make him more persuasive. Talks louder. He does nothing by half-measures; throws in with every fight—but they’ve never seen him fight like this, and in the way his head twitches towards the screens on Scarada they think maybe they know why.

Diablo grips several segmented legs as they skitter over her torso and snaps them with a thunderous crunch like a crab dinner.

Chuck’s hands flail in the air as he gesticulates at the screens, at his badge, at his uncle. Marshal Bae is listening. So are Shen, Po, the Weis. Herc is not.

Scarada rolls away and submerges. Diablo gets her feet back but in the headcams, her pilots’ faces are shaken.

Herc is distracted and Chuck is a tactician. He presses his advantage and almost manages to extract a _go-ahead_ in defeat. Herc is distracted and Chuck insists, and Diablo’s leg is run through with the spiralling horn that separates muscle fibres like wool.

Herc rounds on Chuck and orders him out of LOCCENT. The comms explode with SITREPs from every level. Marshal Bae is already barking back at Herc and Scott to stand ready if Lima calls for more aid.

Chuck is drawing in a breath, face twisting, charging up, lightning in his eyes— and his father shuts him down. He doesn’t go without a fight. **_Why_** _can’t I stay?_

If Chuck makes it to Ranger, he will, they think, be something rare to behold.

 _Authorised personnel only, Chuck_. The Officer tone is a final fuck-you. Herc’s back in Victoria Harbour dragging his battered body up through a hatch to stand atop Lucky, peering down at a dead kaiju with his brother crawling up behind him. Ranger, not father. _You know that._

Diablo’s rolling away from Scarada in the surf, staining the water around her black-yellow-green with fluids draining from her wounds. Her pilots must be screaming.

 _Uncle Scott is staying!_ Chuck’s face is screwing up.

_Scott’s a Ranger. When you’re a Ranger you can do as you like. Until then: **quarters.** _

Chuck reels back but his father’s hands are already physically turning him by the shoulders, shunting him at the door. Chuck’s not quick enough: he’s caught in his father’s force and blown forward like a roof in a hurricane. The Weis are ignoring the scene again. The Hughies don’t even look around. _They‘re staying!_

Ice breaks down the twins' spines like a Kodiak water challenge. Chuck isn’t pointing to the Weis. Beside the twins, Sorvino tenses like he’s on the mat, but he doesn’t move. Herc is frozen. His eyes skip, side to side, Dana to Tahnee, and back. His hands are tight on his son’s shoulders and a muscle jumps in his jaw. For a fraction of a second, the twins feel very young and very small. They half-expect him to order them out too just to make Chuck go along quietly; for the same interval of time Dana thinks that she _does_ see that thought in his eyes.

But when it passes his gaze is heavy as a Ranger tab but there’s not a shred of defeat in it. _They –_ the word pulls through his teeth like a grenade pin – _are Rangers._

Chuck jerks away like he’s been branded. He’s gone before his uncle can catch him; the look he shoots the twins in passing is vile—but it’s milder than the one he reserves for his father.

On the true-colour feed, Romeo Blue drops into the sea and Diablo props herself up enough on one elbow to aim a plasma caster over her own shoulder.

. . .

( _You are five, and you leave scratches on your mother’s neck above her uniform collar when your grandmother peels you away_.)

_. . ._

They don’t know how, but Scott finds out Tahnee was almost ‘Anna Collier’ and the twins become _AC/DC_. This proclamation is accompanied by a sloppy cheek-kiss each and a flower, because of course it’s February fourteenth and the slew of ‘ _Category Three crush on thee, Ranger!_ ’ emails weren’t enough— and then he’s gone, swanning off after a K-Sci whitecoat ( _Thanh, gorgeous! Hold up!)_. They suspect he’s drunk. Or stimmed. (Again.)

But it’s an improvement (on _T2D2, C-squared,_ _Mary-Kate and Ashley_ ). It’s before dawn. And Kurago has patrol.

None of these things encourage them to give a flying fuck. They swap flowers for colour preference and finish their tea. Dana gives hers to a girl behind the dishwashing station. Tahnee hands the other to Bo when they pass him at the door.

 . . .

They’re pool-bound for cooldown laps to shake the hangover when they overhear voices down a side corridor. The voices aren’t unmistakable but the tones are familiar enough not to matter:

Herc, furious but voice pitched low. Scott, callow and obstreperous.

The Hansens are on call tonight. Down the corridor the voices drop too low to understand but sharp syllables and bitten-off sounds still carry. There’s a voice at the back of the twins’ heads that sounds like their father telling them not to lurk. (There’s a voice like their mother telling them to only lurk if they can learn something and they won’t get caught.) They pass the end of the corridor just as Herc shoves Scott away from him by the collar.

— _is a goddamn disgrace._

The flush of heat up the back of the twins’ necks is sympathetic, not guilty, but it prickles anyway. Scott’s limbs are too loose as he sways away. Heavy somehow. Movements like taffy, or epoxy without enough catalyst. The last of Hansen’s words follow them dimly down the corridor: _Go see Doc Yuen. Tell him you’ve got a headache and get a stim. And for God’s sake, sober the fuck up. House-arrest’s only just been lifted. Are you_ trying _to get yaself booted from the Corps?_

 . . .

They dream of their mother that night. Fatigue hooks in deep and drags them down—first to the slimy concrete bottom of the pool and then through it, deeper. The water turns brown and tastes of tannin. Then it darkens to black, and sulfur. Then it’s blue. Salt.

They are little girls, skimming the bottom of the dam; they are a Jaeger, walking the bottom of the sea. In the depths, among the flickers of sediment and snow and wedding rings chinking on dog tags, they find her:

Hot metal and lavender, fingers carding their hair, the sweetness of golden syrup in ANZAC biscuits, and a voice on the radio saying _late this afternoon in Jayapura—_

The bunks whine as they swing their legs off. For once, they don’t get shifty looks from the Weis as they take up a position on the far side of the Kwoon mat. Only ghosts and the guilty watch the early hours, Sorvino used to say. They don’t know which face the triplets see in them, but it’s toothsome enough the triplets don’t pull homeground advantage and chase them out.

. . . 

On March fourteenth LT-Father collects them from their quarters in his dress blues. The twins shadow him and Sorvino to the Memorial Hall in silence. The Hall is larger here than the one on Kodiak—less cluttered, better lit; alcoves for each framed portrait. The atmosphere remains: dim, reverential and half-surreal. Dana’s shoulder bumps Tahnee’s as they walk.

At the far end is their destination. There will be a small service here later, and a public one after at the XZ. They’ll attend neither: beside the service portraits of Captain Casey and other pilots who succumbed to wounds (Lo; Chu) or radiation (Mazlin; Kisinee) is their mother.

She looks serene in her blues. It’s jarring: Fiona Collier was many things, but ‘serene’ was rarely one of them. Tahnee has her Herculean energy reserves and Dana her temper, and both of them can strip down and reassemble a rifle or an engine block almost as quickly as the boys in Metalshop (faster for the rifle)—but neither of them ever has the languid, almost placid look of being exactly where they belong that their mother wears in her official Academy portrait. On some level it’s comforting. They know she must have died screaming. But they can imagine she looked like _this_ for the moment of acceptance.

. . . 

They expect Nomad will dismiss them afterwards but they take the lift down to the Staging Area instead. Only when LT-Father halts beside a wall of untreated concrete does it finally hit them, after more than two months of walking by: amongst the mosaic of metal slivers and makeshift crew memorials bolted up is a scrap of black plate with a whisker of yellow at one edge. Her name is stencilled in white.

This is the _crew’s_ Memorial Wall. They knew that. They just never thought about the fact that she would be here too. There are no photos, no plaques. Just names: engraved, burnt, chiselled, painted. Every Strike Trooper, Spotter, Tech, Pilot, Programmer, Instructor who died in service of the PPDC with someone to remember them.

 _This,_ Sorvino says quietly when he’s sure he and his co-pilot have their attention, _is the true beating heart of the Corps._

LT-Father is thousand-yard-staring at that little yellow slip. How many nights _they_ went to the Kwoon, they wonder with a lurch, did he come _here_? This is the way, he says, cutting off Sorvino with a look, that the Corps remembers its own. Not the way the media does. These two places are where they will _always_ find something of the people lost along the way. It’s the where, the why, the how of continuing to fight. It’s everyone who’s ever died, and everyone who will. Everyone who gave them a reason to fight and everyone who showed them how.

He turns away from the Wall and the twins realise that for the first time since they arrived they honestly have no idea who they’re looking at. He fits none of the patterns of Father-FLTLT-Ranger-Commander. They don’t know this face.

 _This_ is their duty, he says. Above and beyond all the media crap, the politics, the performance reviews, the budgets and manuals and polishing their Ranger tabs—just this:

Remember the fallen. And never, _never_ dishonour them by giving anything less than all.

There’s a bitterness in his voice that sets an ache in their hearts, and a distant set to both men’s eyes that sticks them in place unmoving until the morning crew comes on deck for muster.

 . . .

Tahnee wonders aloud to Dana about that as they lie in their bunks in the dark that night. What’s in his head to make him talk that way.

Dana, her eyes shut so they don’t play tricks on her in the dark, suggests they don’t find out. If Tahnee wants to know so badly, she should ask the Marshal about a sync-Drift. But remember that she would see into LT-Father’s mind with the same intensity she sees into Dana’s.

That’s enough to get a quiet _ew_ and Tahnee drops the subject. But Dana thinks she knows who was talking; she thinks maybe, at the outermost possibility, they met _Derek_ down in the hangar today—just for a little while. And if so, was that the first anyone had seen of him since Jayapura? Because the way Dana heard it, when one pilot died the other did too—regardless of how many bodies were pulled from the wreckage still breathing.

 . . .

( _You’re eighteen, and you’ve accepted that the footage from Venator’s Conn-Pod footage will never be released to the public. You just don’t understand how you can be family and still count as ‘public’.)_

 . . .

Unnerved by Scarada the UN elect to move their Australian assets south ahead of schedule. The Sydney Shatterdome is not complete. It’s functional by now, it’s just not finished. Still. The change unsettles a few feathers. While there’s some surreptitious fistbumping under the triplets’ bit of the table, the twins don’t think it’s a coincidence that all of the senior command crews sequester themselves individually after the Rangers are dismissed from the conference room.

Lucky is going, as is Nomad. Kurago, Krieger informed them through the vid-screen, is too. _Pack your bags, Rangers. You’re shipping out._

Back to Sydney.

 . . .

Dana’s distracted and one of the triplets jams his knuckle into a nerve cluster that leaves her sick and gasping on the mat. This triplet has the smoothest hairline and a pale line of an oven burn across one forearm: Cheung.

If they die in the field this will be the last time the Colliers set eyes on a Wei. From her stretch at the edge of the mat Tahnee lightly informs Cheung that Dana would consider this a great shame, but even moreso if she suffocates in the Kwoon, and to please stop kneeling on her twin’s throat.

Cheung laughs, shifts his weight. The red doesn’t fade from Dana’s face when he rocks back onto his heels. The twins’ Mando is nowhere near conversational but she gets the gist when he asks dispassionately if she’s going to be sick.

She might be. There’s an unpleasant pulsing in her solar plexus from the knuckle-strike he landed before the takedown. A shadow of a grin she might be imagining wavers at the corner of his mouth; in English he advises her to wait a few seconds and then roll onto her back. He too would consider it a shame if this was the last time she ever laid eyes on his pretty face. He prefers them to the Hansens. (Though that’s not saying much.) Try a deep breath, he suggests. Like everything, he says this too will pass.

 . . .

The Jaegers are transferred by aircraft carrier—three of them in a line. The most heavily-armoured ducks the twins have ever seen. They stand atop the Shatterdome to watch the procession pull out to sea, measuring the sensation of their insides stretching away like holding onto each others’ wrists and spinning too fast. They should be travelling with her.

There’s a taut expression on Hansen-the-Elder’s face as they all stack into a Lear that says maybe they’re not alone, but Herc’s wrapped up in getting Chuck to turn off his tablet for take-off and Scott’s pulled his cap down and gone to sleep.

 . . .

In Sydney K-Sci, Air Support and Trooper facilities are separate. They can no longer ‘accidentally’ wander into the Air squadron’s breakrooms. Tahnee seems a little put out by this. But the ‘dome is slick—smaller. More compact, tucked up on a headland where a beach nobody really uses anymore has been half-swallowed by steel and concrete, and only diehard surfers brave the blue at daybreak to watch Troopers and Rangers run sand laps.

At the other end of the day, if they sit on the Staging Area roof in the gathering dusk they can watch the landing lights of planes angle low to land in the west. There are less of those than there used to be.

 . . .

 _Ya dad’ll kill you,_ Sorvino says idly, leafing from one design to the next. From more than six feet away both resolve to solid black, but where Dana’s is gears (pinions, flys) Tahnee’s is circuitry.

 _You’re not our dad,_ Dana reminds him.

 _I’m not going to kill you either._ He pushes up from the Rec Room’s metal table with a sigh but there’s a bounce to his step as he head for the door and he smoothes his moustache in a way they haven’t seen since Kodiak. _All right, chickadees, let’s go get a car._

. . . 

They sit on the roof of the Staging Area at dusk with stinging biceps, but this time they aren’t watching the planes that flee. Instead they watch an ant-size silhouette running laps on the broader north beach where the Rangers do in the morning: Chuck raging against his own unphysicality where his father isn’t there to judge him.

No one’s taught him how to train smart yet. Even from here, his technique is shoddy and he’ll do an ankle going the way he is. He’s just flailing at the loose muck above the tidemark. Powering away with brute bloody-mindedness in the dusk. Did they look like that, they wonder, in Kodiak's slush and mud after Jayapura?

Down on the beach Chuck trips on circuit eighteen but scrambles back to his feet before the beachcombers at the waterline can look his way.

 . . .

It’s late night a week later when Scott jumps in the lift with them. He’s going for ground, and they’re going for twelve, but he says he can wait and his fingertips drum doubletime on the handrail. Their delts still itch, LT-Father’s communicating his displeasure by training them into the ground, and psych eval with Dr Patel at nineteen hundred has never sounded less appealing.

Scott says he has something that’ll help. (They don’t joke that it’s crabs.) The words of a less pugnacious comment die on their tongue anyway:

The tablet he holds out is pale orange amid the yellow caplets of Metharocin. Stamped with a tiny sun. He cracks his gum and tells them to relax with a powerful exhale; the smell of mint is so powerful they wonder if he ate the whole packet. His smile is the one he wore they day they met him—razor-edged and off-kilter. Pupils blown.

Did he bring the tab with him from Hong Kong? Did he find a supplier here?

They’re not sure they want the kind of help it’ll give them.

 . . .

General Krieger flies in to give a speech about the opening of a South Pacific Shatterdome. Marshal Merriman is introduced as local CO. There’s a lot of handshaking and posing for pictures in their blues. (How much fussing by stylists over women with short hair? How exasperated are the twins when the make-up artist’s response to _we’re here to kill kaiju not look good in pictures_ is _oh, honey,_ everybody _needs to look good in pictures?_ ) Merriman makes some noise about ‘bringing the boys home’ and hurries to assure a tittering crowd he means the Jaegers. He is apparently unaware all three are considered female by commanders and crew.

Kurago is the only rig that hasn’t been battle-tested and it shows in her reception. They wait for someone to crack the obligatory _dingoes-ate-my-baby_ joke during the public address panel and the punters don’t disappoint. The girls laugh it off with Aussie aplomb, but Tahnee has to kick Dana under the table to keep the witty snap-back right where it’s supposed to be: unsaid.

_Dingo Courage? Dingoes don’t really have ‘courage’, wouldn’t you say…?_

_You ever seen one go up against a German Shepherd?_ Dana asks. Tahnee’s knee presses against hers under the table.

Over the table, Tahnee says, _If the definition of ‘being courageous’ is being afraid of something, and doing it anyway—_

— _then what else do you call the ones who know there are traps and guard dogs and poisoned bait on properties, but keep going anyway?_ Dana’s smile is loaded, pointed at the speaker like a rifle. Tahnee tenses at ‘poison’; her elbow shifts a quarter inch atop the table to nudge Dana’s.

 _Pests?_ Someone mutters.

The girls grin. _Exactly._

Are _you afraid of the kaiju?_ Someone else: sharper eyes, shrewder mouth.

The girls don’t have to look at each other to know they’re wearing the same sweet, sardonic smile. _Reckon you’d have to be crazy to strap on a twenty-storey nuclear reactor and walk out into the sea to fight sea monsters, and not be a little afraid,_ Dana says quietly.

_But we do it anyway. Isn’t that the point?_

They call Kurago _war-dog_. The press call her _runty_.

The dissenters are spread out but they’re _loud._ Mingling with the crowd, the girls hear the malcontents like personal attacks. Dana’s shins are bruised by half-time. It pales to overhearing a financier too deep into his champagne flute running a head-to-toe commentary on Venator versus Nomad. From the other side of the group Derek Collier stares.

 _Does he know?_ Tahnee murmurs, eyeing the financier.

 _That Dad’s about to cave his face in in three point eight seconds?_ Dana murmurs back. _Guess not._

The financier’s accent is narrower; more English around the vowels. South Australian. Adelaide developer, they’d guess. This is the moment Sorvino steps up beside LT-Father and puts a hand on his elbow.

 _So maybe you fellas can tell me,_ the financier chuckles, _why exactly we’re taking a chance on a Jaeger that’s already gone down once._ He emphasises the ‘ah’ in _chance._ _I mean, Christ, one of the pilots died last time, didn’t they?_

There, behind LT-Father’s eyes: the flare of their mother’s hot temper. But they ever were opposites: _She did_ , he says frigidly.

Sorvino pulls him away without excusing them. The twins don’t have to watch the sway of their shoulders to know their tread is perfectly, viciously in-time. The men around the financier cough, touch their hair and adjust their cufflinks, and finally someone mutters the punchline to him.

He snorts like a spooked bull. _Hold up, that bloke wasn’t a Hansen?_

. . . 

That’s in April. The _Collier-Lite-half-the-age-twice-the-life-expectancy_ quips stick around—as do the dingo cracks.  They stop being funny on May 11 th.

. . . 

Crossfire goes live at ten-hundred hours on a Tuesday.

Category-II north of Auckland. This time when the Kaiju alarms go off they’re accompanied by a sonorous boom: _Dingo Kurago, report to the suit room. Dingo Kurago to the Suit Room—_

That’s the last thing that goes to plan: the category-4 cyclone that’s been brewing for weeks chooses today to make landfall; Cyclone Josie interferes with flight patterns; atmospherics interfere with comm lines; before they make the engagement radius, a spotter Hawk goes down in the storm. (No one’s quite sure how. It wasn’t anyone the twins knew, and there’s a guilty sourness in the wash of relief for that.)

 _Fucking Tuesdays,_ Dana mutters into her faceplate, forgetting they don’t have the comms on silent. There’s a muffled snort, then Santos’ voice: _I feel you, girl._

Kelly Nomad and Dingo Kurago suited up at the same time—but they don’t land together.

 _Kelly Nomad is fift—n minut—out. Hold position there._ The comms break up with the storm. Or that’s what they’ll say later.

 _Say again, LOCCENT?_ And when nothing came through: _LOCCENT, we’re two mikes out, intercept trajectory. He’ll breach the city in ten. We’re going now._

By the time everyone’s on the ground, it’s Nomad coming to _Kurago’s_ rescue in the Hauraki Gulf, not the other way around. Except there is no rescue.

Gallowtail’s big, reptilian, and he seems bigger from Kurago’s low Conn-Pod. They don’t let it stop them kicking up spume and ploughing through the six-foot troughs on a collision course.

They take him off-guard. Kurago fires off a four-strike combination before he gathers himself and hits back. They dodge two swipes and take a headbutt to the belly before they can roll out of the way of the third. The impact slides them back maybe thirty metres before they dig in enough to stop it. Kurago’s plates grate and shriek alarmingly but they hold. In the Pod everything is

—sweat burning in their eyes like _fire Jesus, Wei, why didn’t you warn me that was a chilli why’s there no_ water in the dam and you _land hard pain like electricity jarring up_ _from_ a busted ankle you’ll have to sit out this _Round Two to_ _Collier thought she was a_ Nak Muay have better technique on flying _elbows equipped with titanium alloy spikes as a back up if your stingblades are neutralised_ —

They drive an armoured elbow into the top of Gallowtail’s skull. They’re not sliding back anymore. They feel the bedrock beneath their feet. Whirr of their nuclear heart. Tingle of electricity through their suits.

Everything moves, for a moment, very slowly. They think they smell grease and golden syrup.

Gallowtail screams and everything speeds up again. He pushes away. Blue sprays out of his skull as their elbow yanks clear and an enormous wave slaps both Jaeger and kaiju sideways. They’re starting to grin at the cheering through the radio when Kurago is slammed sideways again—the opposite direction to the waves. Their breath catches and they clap hands to their ribs.

— _damn that hit_ hard to save her it’s not even your land how fucking dare _you didn’t even say goodbye we had to hear it on the_ radio saying late last night in _Jayapura_ —

They don’t let the RABIT take them. Hull breach, right side abdomen; logic crashes in like a Staff Sergeant at three AM: the chopper. Scarada.

They can't see it but Tahnee sketches out the rough shape in the Drift even as it solidifies in front of them. Gallowtail looses a rattling hiss and skitters back. In the rage of the storm he’s a loosely-defined mountain of knobbly grey spangled with bioluminescence beyond Kurago’s floodlights. And behind him—

Gallowtail explodes from the white-capped swell. They’re already side-stepping. There’s no time to think of the Hawk that went down. Kurago swings bodily aside and

—xenomorph hissing black slick _shiny in the sun the Hawk swoops out of the way_ —

snatches blindly at something grazing past their thigh, latching onto Gallowtail just below the coccyx. Twin lines of bioluminescence flare along his armoured tail like landing lights. Gallowtail lets out a rattling shriek and thrashes. Joints all over Kurago ripple and lock in response; they’re not letting him go to take them out like the spotters.

Damage reports flash up on the HUD: surface wound punched through her anterior plating, superficial tangent. Hull integrity at 93%. They feel it more than read it. But they’re already deploying the stingblades, arm swinging back, up, muscles bunching, teeth bared. Gallowtail’s screech as Kurago severs muscle and bone in a spurt of blue sounds like the thunder of creation. He is enraged. They are

— _elated for you, chickadees, Second Cut(!) aren’t we elated_ Derek Collier the only survivor of the wreck of Mark-One Tasmania Venator guess nobody told them they’d have to _duck_ —

Gallowtail’s forelimb flies at the Pod. It’s the kind of mad swing that took down Venator. Kurago barely moves in time. Later, they’ll watch the replay and realise it’s only because she’s small that it was enough. Smaller than Venator. Tahnee thinks it in the Pod anyway.

—black yellow _blue there on the waves it looks like they managed to inflict some superficial damage but he’s still_ not ready Daz are you trying to kill yourself as _well as can be expected considering_ Jayapura—

They waver. Dropping into that crouch feels like an abyss is opening up underneath them.

— _guess nobody told ‘em they had to_ duck that hitI taught you to try _hard to save her it’s not even your land how fucking dare_ you didn’t even say goodbye we had to hear it on the _radio saying late last night in_ Jayapura on the way to Port Moresby and it looks like the left side of the Conn-Pod has been crushed by that _swing a hanbo at my_ skulls are for pirates we’re—

Kurago. The tail went limp in her hand when she severed it; turning their collapse into an ellipse, they tighten their grip on the tail's base with one hand, and grab just under the spike with the other. Planting their feet, they shove _up_. The point punches straight up through the soft underside of his jaw.

His scream is gargled. He shoves Kurago away and reels backwards clawing at his own jaw. Even as he topples back they are striding forward, closing the distance.

 _Thre— minutes out —urago!_ Someone on the comms is hissing through his teeth (Merriman, a Hughie) and someone else is yammering specs, clearing airspace for the Hawks, but it’s drowned by their father. Their father: forgetting radio protocol, calling them _Tahnee_ and _Dana,_ telling them Nomad is almost there.

Gallowtail writhes in the surf like an eel. The trunk of his tail drags through the water, an outlandish beard slopping luminous blue into the Gulf. More spills from the stump and the split in the top of his skull. The twins are, briefly, bizarrely, reminded of skinks thrashing in the sun with their tails lopped off. He trumpets the attack and bounds clear of the surf.

Kurago sidesteps. Loops an arm around his snout, the other locking cleanly onto his bony neck frill. Using both as levers they jag him and ram an armour-plated knee through his exposed belly.

An elbow to the skull didn’t stop him. Neither did pinning his mouth shut with his own tail. Kneeing his sternum through his guts does.

His whole body sags as they wrench clear of the carnage. Their knee feels warm. As does their elbow, come to think of it. And their chest. Today they will _not_ be allowed to help the techs clean her up. Gallowtail’s corpse rolls with the surf; they have the thought at the same time. Gripping the frill, they lift his head clear of the water. Merriman’s commandeered a comm and the vox is buzzing _what—hell—doing Rangers!_ in their ear along with the adrenaline, but—

The crack must echo all the way across the Ditch to Sydney.

 _No kill like overkill,_ Dana mutters, half to Merriman, half to Tahnee. The Drift is lighting up the insides of their eyes like sunlight on the dam. The kaiju slips back into the water slack as a rice noodle just as the push of Nomad’s landing hits them like a bow-wave.

 _Ten sec—til engagement._ Sorvino is warm with humour on the open line. Nomad touched down half a kilometre from Kurago, and as she wades towards ‘Little Sister’ the girls can see her shaking her head slightly as if her pilots have forgotten their handshake.

 _Bloody rude,_ they make out from the patchy comms. _Not sharing,_ and _didja—raise—in a barn, Daz._ Buried in the background noise is a tremulous heartbeat that might be static or Derek's shaky laughter.

Into the quiet of Kurago’s Pod, Tahnee addresses the comms: _Dad, can you hear us?_

There’s a silence where they can practically hear him: _radio protocol_ and _SOP_ and _don’t use names over the comms—_ and then he murmurs, _yeah._

 _That_ _was for Mum._

This silence fills the comms from all points. For a moment that stretches to a minute that lengthens to an age they are alone in the ocean with a dead kaiju, the thump of their heart, rushing waves and buzzing static.

Maybe he says something and they miss it. Maybe he never says a word. Either way, Nomad inclines her head and Norouzi’s distorted voice is asking them if they see the disposal co-ordinates blinking on their HUD map.

 . . .

( _You are Dingo Kurago and you have never had another name_.)

 . . .

Moderate electrical burns to the right flank. (How ‘superficial’ was the hole Gallowtail tore in Kurago’s side?) They’re not shaking anymore but they’re exhausted. High-strung. Euphoric with pain and adrenaline. Now seems like a good time to not be in front of anyone who might have them re-tested for psychosis. Every muscle aches. Double-vision; phantom pains. Retroactively they ache for Kurago’s audio-input filtration and the numbing of titanium skin because everything is _sharp_ out here and the air on their bare, damp skin feels new and hostile.

They’ve been shelled, Tahnee’s brain whispers into the hangover. Like boiled eggs.

It’s less a hangover than an umbilical cord. They are embryonic. It’ll pass. Meantime, they walk shoulder to shoulder, wrist to wrist, heads turning in unison and a tingle in knee/shoulder/elbow like their bodies haven’t quite worked out they’re disconnected from Kurago yet.

 . . .

Scott asks when they’ll be hitting up the _thousand_ parties guaranteed to be starting up in town right now but Tahnee shakes her head. Maybe later. Food. Sleep. They need to come back down to normal.

_Normal’s overrated._

The look Herc gives him is unreadable. (And yet, Dana thinks, they’ve seen it before.) Scott eyes the space between them (the lack of it) and smiles. When they stop velcroing, he says, maybe they should try and get out there. Nothing quite like a Ranger party.

 . . .

 _(You’re nineteen, and only half of you thinks_ that _look in blue eyes isn’t worth the clenching in your belly.)_

 . . .

There’s a café up the coast that _knows_ its regulars are mostly Corps. Doesn’t stop them being especially fierce in their pride when the women let Nomad drag them out of bed for celebratory milkshakes. Outside’s a gloriously blue morning; seagulls are squabbling over bits of fried lentil patty three kids are throwing; the twins are drinking their calorie intake for the day; the kaiju for the quarter is dead; and the owner won’t let Rangers pay for anything. He polishes a photo of a young man in J-tech coveralls in between glances at their end of the counter to ensure they want for nothing. They _want_ peace: the echoes are _loud._ Moreso than after patrol. They didn’t expect that. Nor did Dana expect to feel so curiously alone in her head. Instinctually she wants to run back up to Kurago and hook in again. Tahnee’s leaning back against her, only half on her own stool, and idly stirring bubbles out of her milkshake. Dana noses her ear and twitches her chin past Nomad – who are arguing about cricket – to a man in Trooper drabs watching the four of them from the other end of the café.

Tahnee shifts her weight against Dana. (Winces when it disturbs the ibruprofen-dulled soreness in their sides.) Not her type. Dana’s chuckle is barely audible; does Tahnee have a type? Tahnee wriggles again so her elbow digs into Dana’s ribs, and then nestles her head back into the crook of her sister’s neck and shoulder. Of course she does. Just, right now her type is ‘Jaeger’ and she will only accept it manifested in Dana.

From the way the man perks up, she guesses they’ve both been staring vaguely in his direction. She shakes her head against Tahnee’s and then rolls it back to get at the straw of her milkshake.

 _You all right, Sweetpea? Snowpea?_ LT-Father has broken off arguing Kline-vs-Poyo to look past his co-pilot. The women nod lazily. At the other end of the café, the trooper looks disappointed. A shadow darkens the door: Bo folding his broad-shouldered frame through it, followed by several other AS staffers. No sign of Santos. (But spotter pilots, Dana reminds herself, aren’t welded at the hip the way Rangers are.) She keeps her face straight and nudges Tahnee. Still not her type?

There’s a momentary pause before Tahnee’s head angles towards the arrivals and a quick smile from Bo, but she doesn’t move. Not her type right now.

 . . .

( _You are born reaching out for each other, and you will die the same way.)_

 . . .

Dana makes a point of learning the names of the Spotters who died. She talks to Norouzi, who talks to a clerk, who mutely holds a sheaf of folders out when Dana opens the door to a knock late one night.

Tahnee says don’t bother: plenty more will die before the war is over. She’ll only hurt her heart. But:

Flight Lieutenant Peter J. Cosgrove; Specialist Owen He Chang. Records say Cosgrove had a daughter; Chang has two brothers also PPDC. At least three people will be in deep mourning right now, regardless of what happened after. Dana reminds Tahnee of that until her co-pilot caves and closes the laptop on her AAR draft.

They attend the hanging of the men’s memorials with the rest of the air crews and the staffers who knew the men personally. And when it turns out one of Chang’s brothers is present as well, both women look him in the eye and tell him,

_Your brother saved our lives._

 . . .

There’s a dozen magazine and newspaper interviews in the week before the press conference (shifted to chime with the start of Fleet Week.) The twins swap names a dozen times before someone gets wise, starts sending labelled headshots head of them, and suggests working in a request to see their decal tattoos. (They pointblank refuse to show the cloth patches over their burns.) But then they’re talking about Ranger tattoos and that’s—

RAAF on Nomad. Javi Piaget’s Santa Maria neck tatt. Kaidonovsky’s knuckles. And inevitably: PPDC Oz Division on Herc, footy club logo on Scott. Which brings them to:

_So the Hansens—_

So _drift compatibility—_

_So what celebrities do you think you’d be Drift-compatible with—_

and irritation bites into their muscles like a cramp. Just to wind them up Dana replies: _you know, there is this one girl—_

Doesn’t seem to matter that Tahnee cuts off the presenter’s thrill with a dry, _Me. She’s talking about me._

 . . .

It bothers her less when Tahnee reports that Suzy Lee mysteriously gained a rainbow-coloured arm bandana. Still less when the kitchen girl from Valentine’s shyly brings two mugs of hot chocolate over to their late night mess hall card game. Dana’s not sure who goes redder at the teasing from the other players, but she manages to say thanks and when McCall jokes, _good to be the king, eh?_ , she and Tahnee exchange glances.

 _King?_ _We’re the goddamn queens. Speaking of which, trip queens and I’m out. Thank you for your contributions, pay up._

 . . .

There _is_ a party after the conference. There’s a _big_ fucking party, in the two-storey penthouse of a hotel that’s more gold and glass and cream suede than the women have seen ever. Floor-to-ceiling windows. Marble-top bar beside the balcony doors. Kaiju theme.

It’s much less sedate than the official event. There, the journos went hard for Merriman (Kaiju Blue spread; unit efficiency; Corps spending; Category IIIs and higher) but everyone kept their clothes on. Here—

Dana’s glad that part’s over. That lanky journo was back and she’d hate to get blood on a fancy dress. (Fancy, fancy dresses. Slinky and silky. Open-backed. Unlabelled but probably worth as much as half the training of the Rangers wearing them. Dana likes them. Tahnee’s more worried about ripping out a hem than how they look for the cameras.) Also: there was a rumour Jessops would be attending. They weren’t at the press event but they might be at the Hyatt.

This is another of Scott’s ‘thousand’: invitation only, Rangers and glitterati and more cheekbone and crystal and make-up than the twins have seen ever (on men _and_ women). Tahnee’s by the bar with Scott when Dana spots her through the dark-lit sea of bodies and bare arms: a silhouette of dark green and black with electric blue shadows. There must be something pathological in the landie obsession with kaiju: fluro orange and yellow paint slick Tahnee’s spine—a blacklight Drivesuit Centipede (a matching design on Dana). (A corner of the light dressing over Tahnee’s burn peeks out from the dress; that matches too.) The bar bunnies are kitted out in scanty mock-up pauldrons and quad plates over their lacy thigh-highs. The bass-heavy music is all Jaegerstomp. The drinks are called things like Shatterdome and Stingblade.

 _What are you drinking?_ Scott is shouting in Tahnee’s ear when Dana breaks free of the crowd.

Dana raises an eyebrow. _Bar’s free for national heroes._

_Bar’s free for everyone. This fancy piss-up’s on some mining magnate’s dime. Let a bloke be charming, would ya?_

As Dana presses lazily to her side, Tahnee smiles. Mimics Dana’s eyebrow. _Ginger beer._

 _Ginger—you’re killing me gorgeous. You should lighten up._ A friendly hand pats the shoulder Dana doesn’t have her chin on. When did Scott get so close? The champagne from the conference is kicking in and the room’s already a little hazy; feels like someone switched up the coding on the Verocitor Sim on them. Kobayashi Maru _,_ whispers a voice in Dana’s mind. Tahnee smiles. Her fingers are curled around Dana’s hip and it’s not to anchor Dana. They smell Scott’s breath; his cologne. No mint this time: it’s all cedar and spice, and something like smoke. Wraps around them, churns through the sweat and desire pouring off the dance floor.

 _Here,_ he says. _This’ll sort you out._ The flagship cocktail is a Gallowtail: Curacao and Galliano and something else with a kick like a quarterhorse. He hands them two. _Better, right?_

Tahnee makes that smacking sound in the back of her mouth the dog used to when she got a mouthful of talcum powder as payback for chewing bathroom supplies. Tahnee slides the glass onto the bar like something tainted. It’s a little bitter for Dana’s taste too.

Scott’s laughing.

Dana asks, _If you’re so adult, what are you drinking?_ and he toasts them with the tumbler, bending just far enough out of the way that Tahnee has to brush against his chest to lean past him to order (alcoholic) ginger beer.

_Bourbon._

He’s not the type to pull of ‘innocent’ well. They let it slide anyway. Hard not to: the beers taste like free peach slices and watching Kurago’s decal dry. Like the sting of the fresh tattoos, the might to kill monsters, and summers dangling burnt feet in the dam.

Scott drifts away to chat up a bar bunny. The twins clink bottles, then foreheads; Tahnee’s laughing that they hit too hard before Dana even swallows. A stinging in Dana’s forehead matches a red patch on Tahnee’s. And then—

Tahnee’s letting a Laotian model coax her into the crush. Gone before Dana can grab her arm. Missing the fact that there’s a _Jessop_ across the room.

Was it always so hot in here? Scott’s gone AWOL. Tahnee’s dancing. Dana needs to go over to the Jessop before she loses all nerve, and Tahnee’ll hit her later because _Duc Jessop, you cow(!)_ but Tahnee’s thigh to neck with her model, and Dana’s—

_Can I get another one of these? Maybe with a tequila chaser?_

 . . .

( _You are nineteen, and Scott introduces you to the other face from The Kowloon Photo –_ this is my big bro, Herc; he keeps me out of trouble—right, mate? – _and you don’t realise yet that the look on Ranger Hansen’s face is not scepticism.)_

 . . .

Duc Jessop is suave. Charming, but _suave_. Japanese-Canadian. Taller than Dana. Oddly sleepy eyes. Handsome. Veeeery handsome. She tells someone that later, dead serious, and their laugh is ripe with cherries and brandy. Maybe it’s Kaori’s. Kaori: willowy and short, with long glossy hair in a high ponytail and a smile like a floodlight. Charmingly solid upper arms. Smells like talcum powder and sunshine.

Dana definitely tells Duc that later, in between arguing the finer points of triple-barrel joints and retractable versus fixed blades. _His_ laughter thuds in her chest like the music bassline but it doesn’t smell like cherries. He doesn’t want to dance, but Kaori does.

Tahnee’s back. Scott’s back. He doesn’t look drunk in the flashing lights but:

_Aaaay, D2C2! You having fun yet, babe?_

His torso crowds Dana’s space like they’re sparring. He smells more strongly now too: aftershave and bourbon. Nicotine. Does Herc know Scott smokes? Also: _Are you high?_ She pulls him close by a handful of unbuttoned collar.

His pupils are huge and his movements like taffy. _Are you asking me to dance? Oh, there’s the other one. Hi, Tahnee. Are_ you _having fun yet?_

Tahnee, at Dana’s elbow, finds this hilarious. Kaori rolls her eyes and puts her back up against an Indy 500 driver. Tahnee wants a drink. She’s dragging Dana, and Dana’s dragging Scott and somehow they make it back to the bar. The bunnies seem amused; their grinning faces contorting like putty. Are they supposed to do that? Tahnee’s chin rests on Dana’s shoulder. Dana’s feeling pretty taffy-ish and tactile herself. She drapes an arm around Tahnee’s waist and leans flush against her co-pilot. They should slow down. They should—drink water or something. Fuck. Something adult. What do adults do in this situation?

 _Adults drink the free alcohol and get buckwild,_ Scott says, shoving another two Gallowtails into their hands. The lights now are teal and hazard orange, strobing with the bass. Tahnee’s grimace looks surreal. Scott laughs. _Don’t pull that face. Drink. And in answer to your question,_ he says as they drink, _I didn’t do anything yet._

These Gallowtails are sweeter. More vanilla; less talcum. Grinning, Scott takes Dana’s glass and bumps her back to the writhing crowd. _Now go have fun. That’s an order, Ranger._

Someone slides her arm around their neck. Bodies press in. The music swells and rolls, an ocean in the dark. There’s a hand on her waist. Someone’s chest against her back. Not male. A forest of hands sway overhead in the electric gloom like kelp. It feels like she drowning. Kaori’s in front of her. Dancing. (Is that what this is?) More dancing. More shots. Kaori’s laughing and Dana tries to work out why she knows it tastes like cherries but her mind is so fuzzy. Did Duc tell her?

Time is meaningless now; it could be eleven-hundred or oh-four-hundred. A flicker of dark green through the crowd on one of the broad plush couches in front of the windows alerts her to Tahnee (Tahnee lying on her elbow beside a sprawled Scott). Is Dana aware of being alone in her head? She can’t feel Tahnee the way she normally does and Tahnee looks amused and a little tired but Dana can't feel her. Scott, Tahnee says when Dana finally makes it to the couch, is coming down. Crashing. Maybe burning. From what, she doesn't know; maybe the stratosphere. Now _Dana_ giggles. (Giggles? Colliers don’t giggle.) He seems less loopy than before. Like his bones have set again.

 _Help a national hero to his room, would ya?_ Crashing. Probably burning. Does he see Reckoner when he’s like this?

 _Better make sure he doesn’t drown in his own puke or something,_ Tahnee mumbles. Scott drapes an arm around her neck as they stand unsteadily.

He’s still a little slurred when he purrs, _that soun’s like a ‘yes’._

Tahnee’s too giddy to roll her eyes as they leave. She might fall. Dana knows this, but there’s no mental follow-up. All she gets is haze: purple and green and gold. Maybe that’s just the lights.

More shots. A wager. She doesn’t remember what it is, who with or what for but there’s a nose in her navel. Sticky skin. Something smells like... bourbon? Kaori’s laughing; arm-wrestling a weapons-manufacturing spokesman; winning. The kelp’s swaying again. Tide coming in.

Supernovas burst in her head. How much has she had? She makes it out to the balcony, and someone’s hand is on the small of her back, someone’s asking if she’s all right. The sting of clonking foreheads with Tahnee is back, throbbing full amp like the monster headaches described by cadets coming off a bad Drift. There’s an odd sick, disjointed, sensation in her guts: her centre of gravity shifted outside and a metre to the left.

 _She’s fine_ , someone says dismissively. Gravelly voice; deep, like a distant roll of thunder.

 _Dana?_ someone else says. _Where’s your sister?_

The hand on her back slides up to her arm and she’s being pulled back inside. The ocean washes over her and she’d pulled under again by a riptide, vanilla and metal and bourbon swelling on her tongue.

 . . .

Someone gives them a lift back to the dome early in the morning—stark early, early enough that the currawongs are considering going back to bed. They spend the day in bed. Someone leaves a tray with bottle of ginger ale and paracetamol outside the door first thing, along with a tray of wheat biscuits, but they the day in bed anyway. Or in the bathroom.

Tomorrow they have a patrol. Might as well do the most recovering they can, seeing as they’re going to feel like ratshit for it anyway.

Tahnee takes three showers, that Dana counts. Might be more. She also spends a lot of time in the bathroom but from the sounds of gagging that’s probably for the best.

That disjointedness hasn’t shifted. The room is too hot, too loud, too bright (even with the metal shutters angled closed). Their skulls throb with a bruise on Tahnee’s forehead. A size too small—like the gauntlet. Dana wants to peel off her skin. Like maybe she’ll find metal underneath. There’s a powerful, immediate wave of longing from Tahnee then the shower starts up again.

 . . .

Dana sees it through the Drift. They’re lining up to step off Kurago’s platform into Scramble Alley and

—nicotine / vanilla / _I want to go back_ / _stay_ / metal / supanovas bursting in her head after _/ I said **stay**._

The bile that rises thick in their throat tastes like bourbon. Struggling not to puke Dana tells Norouzi to hold and turns to Tahnee.

Tahnee is trying not to cry. She won’t look at Dana. She—

_Kurago? What’s going on? We’re showing some anomalous SNS firing._

When Dana asked, Tahnee said the bruise swelling on her hairline must have been from running drunk into a doorframe. She said it was nothing. Looking at it now, Dana doesn’t know whether to shout, punch the console or cry.

It’s not the first time Dana has seen Tahnee’s liaisons through the Drift. It’s part and parcel of living in each other’s heads. Tahnee’s the pretty one. The social one. It’s not new to see darkened corridors, or strange bedrooms. But they’re brief. They’re fun. And they don’t mean much.

This time there’s an angry _red_ feeling around the memory and Tahnee’s fear, and pain, and _shame_ swamped Dana the moment it surfaced, drifting to the surface like an oily scum.

Tahnee might not cry but Dana does.


End file.
